Oculus Hand Tracking
“Hand tracking” via link is considered a developer feature by Meta, so there’s a few hoops you need to jump through.
This is only tested with a Quest 2 and a Quest Pro. It probably doesn’t work with a Rift S.
- Enable hand tracking in your headset - documentation
- Set up your account as an Oculus Developer account - documentation - you do not need to allow USB debugging or install the ADB drivers
- Restart the Oculus PC software
- Enable ‘Developer Runtime Features’ under Settings -> Beta. If you don’t see the option yet, try again later - it can take a few hours
- In HTCC settings, set ‘hand tracking source’ to ‘OpenXR Hand Tracking’
Virtual Desktop
If you choose to use Virtual Desktop instead of Link/AirLink:
- you must use VDXR
- turn on ‘send tracking data’ so that your PC - and HTCC - receive the hand tracking data
- turn off hand tracking in Virtual Desktop, otherwise its’ own controller emulation will be used instead. It is possible to mix both, but complicated, and makes it much harder to diagnose issues
Sleep/wake
Hand tracking and gesture recognition is not perfectly reliable; it will hopefully improve with future Oculus firmware updates.
HTCC reduces the changes of accidental clicks by:
- adding sleep/wake mode
- ignoring gestures unless you’re looking close to your hand
‘Wake’ hand tracking by waving your hand close to the center of your view. Tracking will ‘sleep’ for that hand after a few seconds of little movement.
The limits can be tweaked in the registry if needed.
FAQ
Why do pinch gestures require Oculus headsets?
The [XR_FB_hand_tracking_aim] OpenXR extension is required, which is currently only supported by Oculus headsets.
Other headsets would work if other OpenXR runtimes add support for XR_FB_hand_tracking_aim, or if other projects emulate it using [XR_EXT_hand_tracking] or vendor-specific APIs. I am not aware of any projects doing this at present.
Standard OpenXR hand tracking via XR_EXT_hand_tracking does not provide enough similar precise gestures.